He says there are more to come, one as soon as a couple of months from now. It is not Apple. The first one to sign on was Motorola. The era of fixing your own phone may be underway if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts. The United States made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The necessary parts are on their way.
What has changed? These companies fight tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute. Yes. One French law might have been the tipping point as some legislation is getting through anyways.
The French law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are is changing the game more than anything else. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores, but Wiens points me to this press release by SAMSUNG. A study commissioned by the company found that 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher.
"There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal.The Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs.
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